The novel is the most important form of Western art. It represents the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature lines up against systematic thought, against science and philosophy. Over the past two hundred years the novel has inspired more essays and reflections than any other aesthetic form, and contributed profoundly in conveying ideas of social life and patterns of behavior. Through the novel, Western literature expanded the range of its themes and possibilities, and has come to tell any story in any way; through the novel, Western literature has been able to delineate the ordinary existence of common people in a serious way, expressing the spirit of an age in which nothing matters except the single individual life. Nearly a century after the György Lukács' essay of the same name, this book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the novel as a cultural phenomenon and as a sign and symptom of the modern condition. This is a work of comparative literature covering four centuries of Western culture, but also a book about our epoch, about its values and its genealogy.--

Introduction: truth and literature -- Why the novel matters -- Books of life -- Games of truth -- Literature and reality -- What is the novel? -- A theory of fiction -- People and leaves -- Mimesis and concepts -- The layered contents of mimesis -- The confines of mimesis -- Between nothingness and ideas: the mimetic discontinuity -- Stories -- Narrative and existential analytics -- Narrators -- Levels of reality -- Being in the world -- The origin of the novel -- Historical semantics -- The question of origins -- The first corpus -- Symbolic thresholds: 1550 -- Symbolic thresholds: 1670 -- The territory of the romance -- The territory of the novel -- The rise of the novel -- The novel and the literature of the ancien regime -- The dialectic of continuity and change -- A cohesive epoch -- Classicism and the separation of styles -- Aesthetic platonism -- Moralism and allegory -- Moralistic apparatuses, poetic justice, and exemplary heroes -- The legitimization of the romance -- The legitimization of the novel -- The book of ordinary lives -- Romance and private aims -- Suspense, entrelacement, and the romanesque -- The story of private lives -- A gap in discourses -- The pathos of proximity -- The interesting -- The novel's readership -- Particular life -- National differences: France and England -- The birth of the modern novel -- Freedom from rules of style -- Freedom from the allegory and the moral -- Moralism, empathy, and observation -- A new conceptual air -- The weight of novels -- The expansion of the narratable world -- The middle station of life -- The serious mimesis of everyday life -- The world of prose -- Center and periphery -- Narrative democracy -- The nineteenth-century paradigm -- Abstractions -- Realisms -- The frameworks of the nineteenth-century paradigm -- The figurative novel and its theatrical model -- The discovery of the environment -- Dependent individuals -- The melodrama model -- The significance of the melodramatic novel -- The romance in the novel, special characters -- The novel of fate -- A map of the nineteenth-century paradigm -- The transition to modernism -- The second phase of nineteenth-century realism -- Realism without melodrama -- Historical stations -- New narrators -- New plots -- New characters -- Three turning points -- Stories and epiphanies -- Worlds apart -- Modern forms of the romance -- The sense of a transformation -- On contemporary fiction -- After modernism -- The decline of the new -- A multiple archipelago -- Conclusion: a theory of the novel -- The genre of particularity -- Relativism and prospectivism -- An analytics of existence -- Discursive transformations -- The design of this book -- On the present state of things